Covering Your Tracks

After months of mud, muck and mire around the barn and in the pasture, things are just starting to dry up.  We are all happy.  It is so much more enjoyable to do chores without having to trudge through the mud, stepping out of your boots and getting your socks muddy!  I even think the cows are happier.

They've left their footprints sunk deep in the ground as reminders of the monsoon season.  Here's one hoof print right here:

Here is another that is sunk even deeper.  Some people's cows actually get stuck in the mud.  Fortunately ours did not.  There were mornings, however, that they did not want to come into the barn due to the thick mud.  On other mornings, Tricia had to give the cows a bath before milking them as they were so very muddy.  We have on our "to do" list to build a loafing shed or 'wings' off the southern side of our barn to give the cows somewhere to go to get out of the inclement weather. 

I was thinking about the cow tracks all over the pasture when coincidentally, I read a very interesting story about cow tracks.  It seems that back in the Prohibition Days (1924), people making moonshine were intent on not getting caught.  Revenuers, or those government agents trying to find the people making "shine" and destroy their stills, came across some very crafty people.

Since the moonshiners were making the moonshine in the hills, mountains, and countryside, they didn't want the revenuers to see their footprints and follow them to their still and destroy it.  So they made for themselves, "cow shoes."  These were attached to the bottoms of their shoes and the bottoms were made of wood and carved to look like cow tracks.

Image Credit

When the revenuers would come across the cow prints, they would think that they were following some cows and not be suspicious and thus, not go down the trail.  As a result they wouldn't get caught.  The cow shoes were simply attached to the bottoms of some ordinary shoes!

It is said that the moonshiners got the idea from a Sherlock Holmes mystery entitled, "The Adventure of the Priory School" where a similar scheme was hatched.  Sherlock figured it out and evidently the revenuers did too!